


Minerva

by sophiagratia



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Religion, USS Minerva, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 08:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wisdom and war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minerva

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmic_llin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/gifts).



> _This story takes up the premise sketched by[Llin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/) in her [fancast of a sixth Star Trek series](http://cosmic-llin.tumblr.com/post/38171091636/fantasy-casting-a-new-star-trek-series-set-some). The original characters here belong to her in the same way that the canonical characters belong to Paramount &c. _
> 
>  
> 
> _Llin suggests that the USS Minerva took flight a few years following Voyager’s return to Earth. This is a moment of conflict for the Federation, still reeling from the Dominion wars and still poised in a defense posture against a Borg threat that no longer exists. The Minerva’s own crew bear some old war scars – the Betazoid tactical officer, for example. How does a Betazoid become a weapons and strategy expert, if not in the course of the occupation of her planet by the Dominion and its relative abandonment by the Federation? And we know from the slim canon Llin has provided that young Ensign Peel’s story begins as one of post-war trauma. The First Officer, scion of a Starfleet dynasty, may wear some cocky swagger in that darling-of-the-admiralty way, but how many of her friends and relatives saw too much of the front in the Dominion wars, at Wolf 359, in the war with the Cardassian Union, in pre-Kitomer Klingon conflicts? And the Minerva’s Captain – all we know of her is that she is Starfleet’s first Bajoran starship captain. How does that happen? My sense is that the voyages of the Minerva are the tale of Starfleet coming to terms with itself, confronting its own ideology and beginning to move into a new era of politics in the Alpha Quadrant. With the tone and plot-arcs of DS9 and the exploratory ethos of TNG, where might such a story boldly go?_
> 
>  
> 
> _Here, I look for a way into Captain Jeris Dwyna, as she talks with an old friend on the eve of her new command – talks, and remembers._

*

Her hair was shot through with fine and scattered strands of white. It had already begun to fade from the deep shock of red to a sober kind of copper color. This was not the first time she’d noticed, but for the first time now she studied it closely. Her hands worked quickly, deftly, binding her long and faintly white-threaded hair at her neck, and she watched her reflection. She was not so old, she thought, as she studied the lines that fanned out from her eyes, that traced the contours of her smile, that moved and deepened with the activity of her expressive eyes; those strikes of white in her copper-colored hair; the veins that stood out strongly on her hands. She smoothed the collar of her uniform and drew herself to her full height and set her jaw and measured the effect. 

It was difficult to understand, the image of this commanding woman in her middle age. She felt so insufficient to her own reflection. But the woman in the mirror would have to do. 

She pressed down the sense that the General’s insignia at her throat were too conspicuous, that they flashed like beacons as she strode across Ops, as the crowds on the Promenade parted around her in a murmur of salutes and _Sir_ s, as the guards at the airlock came to attention. She smiled at them – ‘At ease, ladies’ – and as she asked after their mornings she knew they saw nothing amiss. For them, this was not unlike any other day, and it was only reasonable that the General would want to greet a Starfleet Captain in person, and still more _this_ Starfleet Captain. They chatted sweetly and shyly with their C.O. and they laughed genuinely at her jokes and they entirely failed to disguise how in awe of her they were. It bucked her up a bit. It almost always did.

When from the airlock behind her came the unmistakeable wheeze of compression, she turned sharply on her heel. As the massive cog of its hatch rolled back, it was everything she could do to keep herself from an instinctive stiff salute. 

‘Welcome to Deep Space Nine, Captain Jeris,’ she said, hating her own formality.

But Jeris Dwyna’s smile was bright and contagious as it ever was, and in an instant, it collapsed the time that had stood between them.

‘Hey, kid,’ Dwyna said in her bright, warm voice, and there was more respect and admiration in it than anyone had ever managed to put into her rank and title. 

*

Nerys was fifteen years old when she first watched Dwyna, a decade her senior and only just promoted by death to leadership of her own cell, go toe-to-toe with Shakaar Edon. The Cardassians had made a prison camp out of one of Rakantha’s oldest monasteries. The rumors of what went on there were enough to boil anyone’s blood. But orders came down, again and again, not to risk breaking Tilari, not yet. And one night this strange, stubborn woman appeared at their camp, determined to make sure Shakaar knew just exactly how offensive she found those orders. Furel made himself scarce; Lupaza covered her mouth to disguise her snicker. Nerys crept as close as she dared, to watch – and learn. Rakanthan to the bone, Dwyna’s earring marked her as descended from an ancient monastic d’jarra. She quoted scripture in three languages, and when that didn’t work she just started shouting epithets. Nerys had never heard anyone call Shakaar a coward before. 

Dwyna, she thought, was very brave – and gorgeous in her bravery, in the lamplight that flickered in the caves. And clever – she’d positioned herself in the one place where she wouldn’t have to stoop, and took full advantage of her height to glare down at Shakaar, shaming him with the fullness of her presence. Nerys was entirely in awe. And when Dwyna was done with her thorough account of Shakaar’s political, military, and moral failures of leadership as well as his choicest personal flaws, Nerys followed her out of the caves and into the moonlight, silently out to where Dwyna just sat down in the dirt and lay her head in her hands and began to weep. 

Nerys turned on her heel, prepared to leave her to her private grief, but the dry Dakhuran dirt betrayed her. Dwyna turned and saw her, and then, of all things, Dwyna smiled. 

‘Hey, kid,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. Really. C’mere.’ She gestured, beckoning. Cautious, still a little awestruck, feeling unfamiliarly shy, Nerys crept toward her. ‘Sit with me.’ Dwyna laughed. ‘Kid, I’m not going to shoot you. Sit down.’ 

Nerys sat. 

‘I think you’re right,’ she said, but it was only a kind of pathetic whisper. She cleared her throat. She looked Jeris Dwyna in the eye. She took a breath. ‘I think you’re right,’ she said again, her voice steady and strong. 

‘Good. Because I _am_ right.’ She wiped her cheeks and scrubbed her palms on her knees. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ 

‘Nerys.’ It didn’t bother her at all to be called _kid_ like that, which was surprising. ‘Kira Nerys.’ Dwyna nodded. 

‘Okay.’ She was still crying, Nerys realized. And it didn’t make her seem weak or stupid or out of control. ‘Do you want to help me, Kira Nerys?’

‘Help you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Liberate the Tilari Monastery.’ 

Nerys stared at her for a while. ‘Against orders?’ 

Dwyna shook her head. She scrubbed her cheeks again. The tears had stopped. ‘No. On my orders.’

‘Why are you asking me? I mean, don’t you have your own people, your own cell?’ 

‘I’m asking you, Nerys, because you think I’m right and that makes you my ally. And you look scrappy.’ Dwyna smiled at her again, bright and contagious. ‘And do you really think there’s a single person in Dakhur now who doesn’t know what you did at Nketh Sharin?’ 

Nerys blushed and scuffed her heel in the dirt. ‘That wasn’t –’ but her voice failed her. It wasn’t a lot of things. What else do you do, when the mission leader goes down and the chain of command goes to hell in the middle of a raid? You clear your head and you lay down covering fire and you take over and start shouting the first thing that comes to you and for some reason people listen to you and they do what you say and you pick up your C.O. even if he’s twice your size and you get _out_ , and you get _everyone_ out, and that’s just what you do. It’s not until later that it occurs to you to ask yourself if you _can_ do it, you just do it. And if the mission turns out to have succeeded after all that it’s just sheer dumb luck. She took a deep breath. She didn’t try to explain, she just kept scuffing her heel in the dirt.

‘Okay,’ said Dwyna. Like she knew. ‘So are you going to help me?’

*

‘ _Minerva_ , now – Minerva is the name of a very ancient Earth deity. Goddess of wisdom and war, something of an erudite virgin as I understand it. Also called Athena, which I also like, but Minerva’s more stately, don’t you think? There’s too much to read about her – you have to hand it to humans, if nothing else, for being prolific in their mythologies – but here’s what I learned that I like: her avatar is an owl. They’re amazing birds – enormous eyes, they can turn their heads all the way around, and they just look like they _know_ things – there was a huge, beautiful one in the Academy arboretum when I was teaching; I used to love to visit her. Anyway, they’re gorgeous! Look it up. Owls. And Minerva and her owl – this is the part that I like maybe the most – became the symbol of women’s learning, in the modern period, when the Western nations began to believe that maybe education for women was a good idea – primitive apes – and some enterprising women began to found colleges and to take Minerva as their guiding spirit and her owl as their crest. I’d like to get one of those crests reproduced for the bridge – maybe I can get Vedek Mara to do it for me before I go, she does such beautiful work. Oh, and there was also something very confusing about a twenty-first century scholar of the occult – a kind of folk sorceress legend, I think – who interested me but proved somewhat archivally elusive. She can’t have been real, can she? In any case, I think it’s a fine name for a ship, don’t you?’

Some things never changed, and one of those things was that Jeris Dwyna could _talk_. And now here she was, talking her way through a glass of bright Terran beer, and there was something beautiful about it – the carelessness of her good humor, her smile bright as ever, brave and bold on the eve of a new command. She’d been on the station three days now, and Nerys – helped along by this evening’s deep measure of voodai – was finally starting to relax. She couldn’t help smiling.

‘What?’ 

‘I just love to listen to you talk.’

‘You always did, Nerys.’ 

That was true enough. Also true was that talk as she might, Jeris Dwyna never wasted a word on idle chatter. 

‘It is a beautiful name, D.,’ she said. Nerys had only seen the _Minerva_ ’s schematics – the ship was waiting for Dwyna in the yard at San Francisco – but she could picture perfectly her old friend’s commanding stance on her bridge. ‘And she’s a beautiful ship. I can’t wait to meet her in person.’ Dwyna got that gleam in her eye that most women reserve for lovers. If asked, she’d probably say there wasn’t much difference to be told between a ship and a lover – or if you thought there was, you shouldn’t be in command. Once a pilot, always a pilot. Nerys bit her lip, sketching spirals in the condensation of her glass. ‘On the fearsome side, though, isn’t she? You should have seen Laren, practically sobbing over the weapons array and the redundant cascading shield modules.’ 

Dwyna only nodded, but her good humor evaporated in the instant. The history in her features was palpable – like if you reached out, you could touch the fierce girl Dwyna who held a rifle for the first time at age fifteen, or the daring young pilot, hero of how many labor camp liberations, or the decorated veteran of the Dominion war – like you could almost see the battered beating heart of the woman who had all her life hidden beneath that beautiful grin just how shaped she was by atrocity. It was too familiar, that palpable history. Nerys wondered what Dwyna saw when she looked at her, and then drank deep to keep from dwelling on that thought. 

‘Starfleet has finally admitted that what it builds are war ships,’ Dwyna said bluntly, and winced. ‘As for Laren, you’re evidently the only one in the quadrant who didn’t hear us screaming at each other in her quarters last night.’ She emptied her glass at a go and flagged a waiter for another round. 

‘So you disagree with her?’ That earned a snort. When Nerys had left Ops yesterday, Dwyna and Major Ro had still been huddled happily over a wide-screen console, taking the _Minerva_ ’s schematics apart like schoolgirls with their first engineering starter kit. It was a sweet sight, Nerys had thought, and she liked to see her first officer with something to smile about – but perhaps their differences ran too deep for such an easy fix.

‘Disagree is a polite term.’ Dwyna traced with one long finger the rim of her newly-filled glass, staring into it for a long silent moment. ‘Laren is all military. I think it’s guilt, don’t you? Never having served the Resistance – though how could she have, in some far-flung refugee colony? – but she’s just all guilt about it. So everything with her now is weapons. If you don’t like it, fight it. She could be on the fast track to the admiralty, with that view. These days. If it weren’t for her record of fighting things she doesn’t like – ironic, isn’t it. But no, I’m not sure HQ ever got the memo that the war is over.’ Her voice so unsteady; that was a little alarming. Not least because she was right. About Starfleet, about Laren. Nerys watched her drink and drink deep, as though to steady herself.

‘D., you –.’ How could she say _you need to be careful if you don’t want to be stripped of your commission_? How could she say, to a seasoned fighter, _this is not the time to turn coward_? ‘D., this new command – the _Minerva_ – it scares you, doesn’t it?’

‘Scared?’ Dwyna’s laugh was brittle, rueful. ‘Nerys, I’m fucking terrified.’

It wasn’t her first Starfleet command, but the _Minerva_ was a galaxy-class ship. Almost two thousand souls aboard, two thousand lives in her Captain’s hands. And a mission Jeris Dwyna saw as contradictory: exploratory and diplomatic, on the one hand, and defensive on the other. Nerys was starting to understand – and she wondered, idly, whether Laren had yet recovered from her encounter with Dwyna’s rage on discovering that her beautiful new wisdom-goddess was armed to the teeth. 

‘Nerys, I got into this because I wanted out of everything we did, before. The midnight raids and the fire-and-brimstone daily terror of all that.’ Nerys could have told her – Nerys _did_ tell her, fifteen years ago, that Starfleet would never be the passage to a life of peace. But Dwyna had fought her then, and even now Dwyna could only come so close to an admission of regret.

‘There is no out, Dwyna. You know that.’ But what a beautiful dream that would be. They were quiet together for a long moment, and Nerys was sure she wasn’t alone in measuring the gap from that dream to their reality. Absently, Nerys touched the insignia at her throat. ‘There is no out,’ she said again, as though to remind them both. ‘But things do change. What we did then, it was all emergency. All an urgent, paranoid defense posture. Now we have the luxury of thought. Strategy.’

‘Why, Nerys,’ and Dwyna was smiling again, and that was dangerous, ‘dare I say you’ve become a politician?’ There was a time, and not all that long past, when that would have cut Nerys to the bone, when she would have pounced on Dwyna just for the suggestion. Now, it was only a little sad, and she only gave a sad little smile.

‘There’s a lot to be said for politics. Anyway it beats explosions and weapons-fire.’ When she thought of these things, she felt Jadzia standing behind her, heard Ben Sisko’s voice in her mind. And at the same time, felt Lupaza pressing her new earring into her hand, heard Furel singing one of his ancient ballads late at night in the camps. She wondered what Dwyna saw and heard, when she remembered. Behind each of them stretched a long line of ghosts, lines that converged in the distant past. They had paid dearly for their present lives. 

‘That’s for sure. But don’t you think the cards are stacked, when you’re sitting on top of thousands of kilotons of explosive power?’ Dwyna sighed. ‘That’s my assignment, Nerys. Explore, _negotiate_ , and pretend I’m not authorized to blow whatever I’m exploring or negotiating with to teeny tiny bits.’

‘Dwyna,’ Nerys said slowly. 

‘What?’ She sounded so tired. Nerys had learned a thing or two about command – she tried and failed to keep her fingers from her insignia – and she knew that no one, not even Jeris Dwyna, could undertake it from beneath that weight of doubt, that cosmic exhaustion. 

Nerys paused for a moment. ‘Do you remember Tilari?’ she said softly. Dwyna bit her cheek. Nerys was suddenly acutely aware of something she’d known all evening but to which she had until now paid little mind: the attention of the entire room was on them. The crowd might appear to drink and laugh and talk as boisterously and casually as ever, but every Bajoran in the room wanted to know what Kira Nerys and Jeris Dwyna were saying to each other.

She watched Dwyna and wondered if this was a mistake.

But Dwyna only said, her voice a little raw, a little wounded, ‘Of course I remember.’ 

*

The cells had been all shaken up, in those days. Everyone was shorthanded and every day they risked their entire enterprise sending people back and forth; everyone knew everyone and the whole thing was headed for disaster, but there were so few of them and what else could they do? 

Shakaar surprised Nerys and Dwyna both by releasing Nerys to what they made him think would be a kind of woodland-guerilla training mission. The lush forests of Rakantha, with its rolling hills and broad river valleys, couldn’t be more different, from a tactical perspective, from the stark desert mountains of Dakhur. It was as valid an excuse as any. 

It was a little like training, after all. Dwyna made Nerys fly to Rakantha herself. Her knowledge of suborbital flight had been entirely theoretical until that day, when Dwyna folded herself into the navigator’s seat without saying a word. They didn’t fly into any mountains, and they didn’t get shot down, and that was the best that could be said for Nerys’s efforts. But after they skidded to a stop eight hundred meters from their intended landing position, Dwyna only said, ‘Good.’, and began performing post-flight as though a loud and damaging semi-crash were a perfectly reasonable way to put an aircraft down.

She was welcomed into Dwyna’s cell with warmth and companionable acceptance, which only served to confirm her suspicion that this was a suicide mission. She had accepted that the moment Dwyna had requested her help. But the damp life of tent-camps in the deep woods was novelty enough at first to keep her mind from considerations of mortality, and the Rakanthans had a lot to teach her, about a lot more than tactics and terrain.

Many of them were pacifists, for one thing.

Here there was no consensus that collateral damage was acceptable, that the deaths of Bajoran collaborators were just retribution, that the destruction of Cardassian life was a necessary and even primary objective of the resistance. Some of Dwyna’s comrades even believed that any violent act – an infrastructure-targeting explosion, for example, that incurred no casualties at all – could not be condoned, and in conscience they must abstain from any activity that might contribute to such violence. 

Nerys lost a lot of shouting matches, those first few days in the woods.

Well, Nerys was shouting. Her interlocutors were calm and wry. Dwyna never intervened, but she always seemed to be nearby, listening. Dwyna would be sitting with her back against a tree, her long, lithe hands at careful work on the delicate mechanism of a rifle’s phase inducer or sketching the schematics for a new model of grenade. No pacifist she, at least. 

When Nerys stopped shouting, she started learning some useful skills. Listening was first among them. She watched the medics preparing conventional medicines out of found materials and jury-rigging rudimentary scanners and regenerators, and as they worked they told stories, and Nerys listened to them. She put her native sense of space and strategy to work, quietly gesturing over blueprints of Cardassian medical and agricultural infrastructure, and listened to the stealth teams as they plotted their heists – and told their stories. She sat with the vedeks and ranjens – or the ordinary resistance recruits who had once been vedeks and ranjens and who hoped so honestly to be so again one day – and she drew their stories out of them as they coordinated refugee transportation and housing.

Early mornings, as she pieced together what she had learned – clumsily reassembling an ancient tricorder; drawing diagrams of bloodless raids; designing evasive tactical maneuvers – she turned those stories over in her mind. She considered what it meant for Aral to see his brothers gunned down and turn not to vengeance but to unclouded reverence for all life, for Nilaza to simply move quietly from a life of contemplation within a monastery’s walls to a life of contemplation and strategic tactics in the deep woods, or for Mari to have faced what she did in the house of a Gul and decide that her life’s work would be healing and not destruction. 

She could not claim to understand – and she thought, then, that she never would, and she was not far wrong.

When she trained with the assault units, weaving through the trees, rifle ready, sweating in the low wetlands, laying ambushes in a riverbank or sniping from a high branch, she asked herself what it might mean for her never to do this again. She found she could never quite conceive of it.

But at night, in the quiet, Dwyna would talk. And talk, and talk. She never spoke of means, only of ends. Like a mother telling fairytales, Dwyna would talk of the Bajor they would build in the occupation’s aftermath. The occupation’s _end_ was a thing she understood as fact – only a fact not yet accomplished. Sometimes, they sounded like sermons, those talks of Dwyna’s. And like sermons, they were built on a faith that communicated itself to everyone who heard them. Dwyna’s voice, Nerys sometimes thought, was the only binding force that held her band of mismatched refugees and freedom-fighters together.

*

Nerys had never known a mission to go as planned, but she had never seen a catastrophe quite like their first minutes inside Tilari’s grounds. What they had conceived as an air-driven shock strike immediately became an enmeshed ground battle as they found themselves outgunned by a defensive force considerably larger and better prepared than their intelligence had indicated. Nerys would never be able to remember exactly what happened, in those minutes. What she remembered was her vision going red and her blood pounding in her ears and her spray of rifle-fire and the nauseating exhilaration of watching a line of Cardi guards go down before her charge. 

Then her vision cleared and time slowed down, and she didn’t have the luxury of puking so instead she slung over her shoulder her rifle and the limp Bajoran body closest to her and ran for the cover of a colonnade, then on toward the sanctuary that served as the Cardi HQ. She dropped her companion unceremoniously in the curve of an alcove near the narrow arched doorway and slumped against the wall, breathing hard. After a moment, she turned to assess the person next to her and found that it was Mari, regaining consciousness. 

Mari shifted and looked up at her, a question in her eyes, and Nerys found the weight of that suddenly unbearable. 

‘I think it might be just us, from here, Mari.’ Assuming anyone else had made it through the initial assault would cost them both their lives. Dwyna’s smile flashed, for an instant, before Nerys’s eyes. Ruthlessly, she shut it out. The sanctuary was small enough that two could hold it, for a short time. Long enough for the prisoners to escape. Assuming they knew to run and not hide: another assumption, but one she could not do with out. Yes, two could hold it. Nerys was sure of it. Provided that both of them were willing to fire a rifle. ‘Mari.’ 

‘Yeah,’ Mari said. She knew. Mari volunteered, Nerys told herself. Mari was a medic and Mari knew the risks of combat triage, and Mari volunteered anyway. And anyhow, here was Mari, and there were only so many options. And Nerys could not afford to let herself think about that.

‘Okay. Wait here. Count to fifty. If I’m not back, run.’ Mari nodded. ‘You hear me? You _run_.’ 

‘Yes. Okay. Yes. Go.’

Nerys crouched for a moment, cradling her rifle, gathering her senses. Two by the door and one at the central console. That was what she would do. She hoped that was what they were doing. A rifle each. Probably a side-arm. Knives, too, maybe. In, incapacitate, disarm, out, back again. Nerys took a deep breath, looked to Mari once more – ‘ _Go!_ ’, she hissed – and ran. 

She spun into the archway, threw her elbow left and then her knee, and didn’t wait for the sound of the body on the ground before she whirled and brought her rifle with a sickening crunch against the face of the guard on her right. He too dropped; she ducked and rolled and came up firing and the third was down. A blast at her ear surprised her: she whirled once more and fired blind. The unexpected fourth guard got off a call for backup before he lost consciousness. Breathing hard, she smelled her own singed hair, felt the burn at her shoulder, but she didn’t stop moving. Voices, loud and fast and getting closer, urged her forward. 

She handed a rifle to Mari. She didn’t remember picking it up. ‘Do you know how to use this?’ Mari’s hands shook. She stared at Nerys’s shoulder. She didn’t answer. Nerys took Mari’s hands in hers, placed them for her. ‘Here, and here. See? Trigger here. Point and shoot. Simple as that.’ Mari nodded, eyes tight.

‘Nerys, your shoulder – I could – ’ Mari knew she couldn’t. Mari was only trying to hold on to herself.

‘Never mind that. There isn’t time to mind that. Are you sure you can do this?’ Mari nodded. ‘Mari. You can run. I can do this alone.’ That was a lie. Mari knew. 

‘I can do it. It’s okay.’ That was a lie, too. Nerys pressed her forehead to Mari’s, the only act of kindness she could afford.

‘Okay. Listen. They’re going to fill that room. We are going to stand in this doorway and shoot at them until they shoot us down. Our job, our only job, is to keep them from leaving, okay? No matter what. At any cost.’ 

‘Okay.’ It wasn’t the price of her life that Mari was calculating. But if Nerys stopped to consider that, everything would be over. The rush of footsteps was terribly close.

‘Stand behind me. Don’t shoot until you have to, okay? Don’t shoot until I go down. That’s less for you to do. Okay?’ Mari didn’t argue. ‘Okay. Now we go.’ 

Mari moved like she was born to it. Later, Nerys would remember a story about that Gul who’d kept her captive and how he made Mari dance, how he’d had Mari trained to move. It wouldn’t occur to her until later. Now, she was only grateful to have a swift, soft-footed partner at her back. 

She whirled once more into the doorway and opened fire. There were too many of them, but there was also too much noise, too many blasts coming from strange angles. 

And then she saw. Dwyna had somehow made her way around behind the Cardi security rush, Dwyna and three others, and they were shooting like mad. Nerys, acting on instinct, dropped out of their line of fire. Behind her, Mari misunderstood.

Nerys hesitated. 

That was what she would replay in her mind, over and over: that she hesitated. Later. 

Now, she froze, caught between her instinct to keep up her rifle-fire barrage and her instinct to prevent Mari from doing what she no longer needed to do. 

In that moment of hesitation, several things happened at once: Mari rushed in behind her; a massive Gul with a vicious blade in his hand grabbed Dwyna around the neck; Dwyna saw Mari and Dwyna’s eyes registered the full significance of Mari’s presence there; Mari screamed; Dwyna shouted.

‘MARI, _NO_ ,’ Dwyna shouted, and at the same moment Mari fired. 

In the next moment, a half dozen Cardassian phaser blasts hit Mari square in the chest. 

Something else hit Nerys, somewhere. She slumped where she was on the ground and stared past Dwyna at the wall behind her. Rifle blasts – her own, she thought – had obliterated the ancient fresco there. How sad, she thought, and then everything went black. 

*

‘She took two Cardis with her,’ Nerys found herself saying later, the wrong thing to say to the wrong people. Aral’s eyes went cold and hard and he turned away from her, and the rest turned too, and walked away. She could have said, _She saved Dwyna’s life_ , and their contempt would have been no less. She did not say, _I hesitated and it cost Mari all her convictions_ , and she felt twice a coward for it. 

But Tilari was theirs. The whole cell moved into the monastery. It was a defensible position, on high ground, with strong walls. It had adequate storage space for food and supplies. It had communication systems, and tall old spires that served well as stations for their ad-hoc defensive sensor array. It had real beds, and running water, and reliable electricity. It should have felt like an improvement over the damp life of tents in the woods. 

But they were haunted by the ghost of Mari. Or rather, by the lingering darkness of Mari’s choice of violence. After her first encounter with Aral and the others, Nerys kept silent on the subject. She found herself agreeing with them. Mari’s act was senseless. She sacrificed her creed for nothing. 

Dwyna was silent, out of character, those first two nights. Silence governed all of Tilari, an uncanny becalmed kind of silence ill-suited, Nerys thought, to the contemplative quiet that should inhabit such a place. They held vigil over Mari’s body, and spoke the words that would commit her to the will of the prophets. They even found a homely old duranja in a store room, and kept it lit for her and for all their many dead. But still the thick, awful silence could not be broken.

On the third night, Dwyna quietly shepherded them all into the starkly magnificent ancient chapel at Tilari’s heart. They sat together around the massive mandala laid into the floor before the altar, dirty and scarred, a crude parody of the contemplative life that once the monastery sheltered. On the third night, sitting at the head of their circle, Dwyna spoke.

‘We gather in peace, the peace that is now and the peace to come.’ 

Around the circle, eyes rose from the ground and unsettled hands stilled. Nerys’s breath caught in her throat. The formal gesture did its work: it brought them together, congregated as one. Dwyna’s voice seemed of a piece with the frescoed walls, the aged enamel of the mandala, the echoing space. 

‘We gather in peace,’ she said once more, her voice drawing them together, her voice and the deep, old liturgy that had withstood centuries, had withstood the worst the occupation could do. 

‘You mourn, but you do not know how to mourn the loss that is before us. You mourn not only Mari’s life. You mourn her will. You mourn her conscience. But I ask you: who are you, who is any of us, to decide for her the dictates of her conscience? Mari’s act was her own. Mari chose. 

‘Mari lies dead on sacred ground. But Mari’s conscience lives. Among us lives Mari’s choice to fire her rifle and to take three lives. And we must live with it and we must honor it. 

‘Ankira, in her commentary on the Heremitic Prophecies, tells us that our lives in this world proceed in an infinite series of finite moments. _Time_ , writes Ankira, _is discrete, and so is will in each of us, the will that moves into action, in moment succeeding moment, now and in each sequent now_.

‘We are each called as we are called, and the call may come in an instant to any of us. And we do not close ourselves, we do not stop listening, because we know that in any instant, the call may change. 

‘We are not in time as we think: we are not whole, entire to our own understanding, in enduring uninterrupted time. We _are_ only in each succeeding moment. Time is discrete, and so is will in each of us. Now – and now – and now – and in each succeeding now. 

‘It is not for us to ask what called Mari to violence. It is for us to ask how we are called, to ask it now, and now again, and at each moment, always. It is for us to honor Mari’s choice by our own choices; it is for us to have faith that Mari heeded what called her, for us to heed what calls us, so that what she gave to us may still live among us.’

This was not Jeris Dwyna’s usual mode of talk. This was not like a sermon, it _was_ one. 

When she had finished, Dwyna lay her hands on her knees, and she called into that rich, unfamiliar voice a hymn. Some in the circle knew it and chanted with her; some chose rather to hum the deep drone that lay the foundation for the more melodic prayer. Nerys was one of those who sang, and as she sang, she felt something new begin in her. Their song, its deep foundation and its rising melody, shaped itself to the shape of the chapel, and, she thought, reconciled them to each other and to this place and to what their gathering in peace had cost them.

‘Go,’ Dwyna dismissed them at the hymn’s conclusion, ‘in peace: the peace that is now and the peace to come.’ 

The monastery was home to a new silence, a silence that endured long after Jeris Dwyna finished speaking. 

Nerys found her, much later, working in the garden deep into the night by the light of a feeble tacked-together lantern. ‘Where did you learn to do that, Dwyna?’ It was the wrong thing to ask, the wrong time. 

Dwyna, leaning back against the old, old garden wall, only looked at her for a long while. ‘Here,’ she said at last. She gave Nerys a moment to sit with that. Generous Dwyna. ‘I was a novice here. Ten years.’

‘How – ?’

‘They used to let us practice, here. In the remoter regions. Not that long ago.’ She gave Nerys a small smile and returned her attention to the rifle in her hands. She kept her silence all the rest of that dark evening.

Jeris Dwyna, it seemed, had once been a pacifist too.

*

It wasn’t the mission Nerys meant when she asked Dwyna to remember Tilari. They both knew that. It was the sermon Dwyna gave in Mari’s memory. For almost thirty years, whenever either of them heard the word _Tilari_ , whenever anyone spoke of its historic liberation, they thought only of that day, of that sermon. 

‘Wisdom,’ Nerys said now. 

‘… What?’ 

Nerys cleared her throat and met Dwyna’s eye. ‘Minerva. Wisdom and war.’ She hesitated, then reached across the table to lay her hand over Dwyna’s wrist. ‘That’s who you were, at that moment, Jeris Dwyna. And that is who you will be to your crew. For Starfleet. For – for Bajor, for what you and I have done, together and since. This ship – _Minerva_ – wisdom and war – she was made for you, Captain.’ She knocked back her voodai and stood up a little too quickly. Nerys might trust Dwyna with her life, but she wouldn’t allow General Kira and Captain Jeris to be seen weeping at each other in public.

Dwyna sat still, looking up at her. ‘Thank you, Nerys,’ was all she said.

* 

She met Dwyna at the airlock early on the morning of her departure. 

Captain Jeris Dwyna. The picture of an officer, in her creaseless uniform, her shining boots, her hair escaping from her regulation updo serving only to make her more commanding. The intensity of her gaze, the presence of the full height of her. And her bright, contagious smile. Nerys felt fifteen again, and felt again that urge to salute.

‘Red suits you,’ was all she said. 

‘And you,’ said Dwyna, raising a hand to Nerys’s hair. Nerys looked left and right, trying to seem not to: they were alone in the corridor. She let herself lean, just a little, into Dwyna’s touch. She had forgotten what that felt like – the simple gesture of care, of trust, into which she could lean. ‘Hey, kid,’ Dwyna said, brushing her thumb across Nerys’s cheek. ‘You know I’m proud of you.’

Nerys cleared her throat. ‘Um.’ She felt herself blush, cleared her throat again, and proffered a small, plain wooden box with both her hands. It seemed so small, next to everything else, but it was what she had to give. Dwyna held her gaze a moment, and smiled again, and Nerys of a sudden felt herself again, and felt, too, all that had passed between them, these few short days. It gave her strength. Dwyna always did.

She cleared her throat again, and opened the box. Inside nested a platinum chain, from which dangled a circular disc, carved in delicate relief. An owl – bearing a spear in one talon, a book in the other. 

Dwyna took not the box but Nerys’s hands, holding it, in hers. ‘… _Oh_ ,’ she said. 

‘Will you wear it, D.?’ Nerys asked, sheepish with the fact of Jeris Dwyna, struck dumb, and sheepish too with the sheer weight of what she held in her hands. To wear a second chain was once an honor reserved for the religious elite – but even were the time of such distinctions not long over, Dwyna’s d’jarra, Dwyna’s training, her ten years at Tilari, would entitle her to it all the same.

‘Nerys – of course – oh, Nerys, yes, of course I will, but how – how did you get this done so quickly?’ 

‘I put in the order weeks ago, Dwyna.’ She leaned close to clip the chain in place. ‘I read about Minerva, too,’ she said quietly into Dwyna’s ear. ‘Did you know that she emerged fully-grown from her father’s head? She wasn’t made or forged or shaped, just born already entirely herself.’ She kissed Dwyna’s cheek and stepped back to admire the effect. Dwyna still looked dumbstruck. But the earring sure was gorgeous. ‘Must’ve given the old bastard one hell of a headache, too,’ she added. 

They laughed together in the corridor, two rough-shaped and hard-forged women with all their ghosts and the girls they once were standing behind them. And then Dwyna took a step back and drew herself into her most formal salute. Nerys thought of those two young women sitting together in the Dakhur dust all those years ago, and some part of her where her girlish self still lived could not believe that Jeris Dwyna was saluting _her_.

‘Thank you for your hospitality, General,’ Dwyna said. Her grin really was something. Some things never changed. Nerys returned it, and the salute, too. 

‘You’re a gift to that uniform, Captain.’

‘Aye, sir.’ She stood waiting at attention. Nerys guffawed. 

‘Permission to disembark, Captain,’ she clipped as they dropped their salutes. 

Dwyna nodded crisply – the picture of an officer – and turned on her heel into the airlock. Unseen, Nerys touched her fingers to her lips and held up her hand in silent valediction. 

She stood in the corridor for a long while, staring at the space Dwyna had left behind, and thinking of the _Minerva_ waiting for her Captain in dry dock. If there was hope for the Federation, Nerys thought, it had just stepped off her station and into the new shape of a new life. 

She touched the insignia at her throat. ‘Wisdom and war,’ she whispered, a peculiar kind of spontaneous prayer. 

Jeris Dwyna might be, she thought, the chance they all had of the balance coming down on the right side. 

*


End file.
